The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the most authoritative group on global warming, will report on Friday that it is “very likely” that human activities were the main cause of warming in the past 50 years.

Prominent global warming deniers, such as Rush Limbaugh and Sen. James Inhofe, have already been downplaying the report and contravening the science. But the Guardian reports that there is a more orchestrated movement going on below the radar to confound the public about the IPCC’s report.

The oil lobby is so desperate to push back on the new climate change report that they have been offering to pay global warming skeptics to speak out:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

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The letters were sent by Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at AEI, who confirmed that the organisation had approached scientists, economists and policy analysts to write articles for an independent review that would highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.

AEI has received more than $1.6 million from ExxonMobil. The well-heeled oil lobby is a primary reason why doubt still exists in the general public about the cause of global warming.

As Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth pointed out, despite the fact that no peer-reviewed scientific articles published in recent years express any doubt that climate change is happening, more than 50 percent of news media coverage of the issue includes the oil industry’s position on the subject.